Videos and video advertisements are the next wave of technologies on the Internet. This phenomenon has several dimensions: broadband network connections making video viewing possible on the Internet, advertisements displayed in video format, popularity of user generated video content, contextual advertisements, etc.
The notion of advertisement insertion in videos is an area of interest. More specifically, the notion of advertisement insertion in user-generated video content is of interest as well as the notion of advertisement insertion in premium content. Premium content refers to content created by a professional for a professional purpose, such as content from a commercial movie.
The points in a video program stream where a switch can be made to another program are referred to herein as insertion points. When the program to be inserted is an advertisement, the insertion points are referred to herein as advertisement insertion points. Presently, advertisement insertion points in premium content are determined manually.
A dominant theme of the Internet is interactivity. Users now expect advertisements on the Internet to be interactive or clickable. A clickable video is referred to as a hypervideo. The clickable regions on a hypervideo are referred to as video hotspots. Hence, hypervideo is based on the premise that regions or objects in a video should be made clickable. Just as a user clicks hypertext, a user clicking on a hotspot can lead to new or further information. Typically, such information is in the form of video, web page, email address, and so on.
It should be appreciated that video viewing is a temporal experience for the user. That is, typically, the video has a beginning, middle, and end. A user starts the video at the beginning and plays the video through until the end. Consider a situation where, in addition to a video playing on a display, a link to an advertisement video, advertisement web page, or the like is presented to a user. The user may be interested in clicking the hotspot or the link to the web page, etc. However, if the user clicks the hotspot or the link to the web page, then the advertisement video associated to the hotspot or the web page associated with the link is immediately displayed to the user. The displaying video advertisement or the displayed web page and the like necessarily interrupt or disturb in some manner the user's temporal experience of viewing the video stream. For example, the video advertisement can temporarily replace the video which the user was watching, until the video advertisement is finished. In another example, the video advertisement can be played on a different region on the display, while the first video stream continues to play. It should be appreciated that clicking a hotspot or link to a web page interrupts the temporal experience of the user watching the video stream. It may even be that the user is interested in viewing the advertisement or in linking to an associated web page. However, most likely, the user is more interested in the presently displaying video stream. Hence, it should be appreciated that in certain configurations where videos are clickable for playing an advertisement or a link is presented, a user typically will not click the videos hotspots or the link to the advertisement. The user typically does not want to interrupt the video. Clicking the video or the video advertisement is likely to result in loss of continuity.
Google™ recently introduced an overlay advertisement format (“overlay ad format”) as an interactive indicator. The functionality of Google's overlay ad format is described in The New York Time's online article, “Google Aims to Make YouTube Profitable With Ads” by Miguel Helft, dated Aug. 22, 2007. In the article, the advertisement appears 15 seconds after a user begins to watch a video clip. The advertisement overlays the bottom fifth of the user's screen. The overlay is similar to headline tickers displayed during television news programs. With the advertisement overlay, the user can ignore overlay and it will disappear after about 10 seconds. The user can close the advertisement overlay. Or, the user can click on the advertisement overlay. When the user clicks on the advertisement overlay, the video the user was watching stops and a video advertisement associated with the advertisement overlay starts playing. When the advertisement finishes playing, or if the user clicks on a box to close the advertisement, then the original video resumes playing from the point where it had stopped playing.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.